Crimson, Chapter 1

Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

Kal/Chloe futurefic
12,500 words
Rating: Adult. If you're under eighteen, please go elsewhere now.
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the WB and DC Comics, not to me.

Three years was too damn long to go without sex.

He leaned casually on the bar, perusing the roomful of women as if they were a buffet laid out for his personal entertainment. He stared at them boldly, as if they were objects rather than people, and most of them returned his gaze with sultry, suggestive eyes.

His gaze fell briefly on a tall, slim one with dark hair, but he discarded her mentally. Then his eyes moved on to an older one with more curves, as well as a mass of curly red hair, but he glanced away, because she didn't appeal to him either.

He was in the mood for blonde.

The smells and sounds of the nightclub all but overpowered his senses. The music was loud, hammering at his superhearing with an insistent, sexual beat, its heavy bass thudding in rhythm with the pounding of hundreds of human hearts. He could smell alcohol, in all its various forms, but since alcohol didn't affect his metabolism, its odor didn't intoxicate him. Far more intoxicating was the scent of sweat that permeated the air, the scent of arousal. The smell of sex.

In the darker corners of the huge room, some couples were actually screwing. They probably thought they were being discreet, more or less, but he could hear their moans and gasps, and he knew exactly who in the room was doing what. There were quite a few couples engaged in sex.

He planned on joining them very soon.

His gaze moved around the nightclub. It was called Atlantis, and very little about it had changed since he'd hung out here regularly five years ago. The music was pretty much the same, and the women were pretty much the same, wearing scanty, revealing clothing and shooting suggestive glances his way as they undulated past him. The only difference was that now he was legal, and actually allowed to be here.

The irony was, he'd spent hours here when he was sixteen, during a summer when he'd run away from his parents' Kansas farm and fled to the wilder life in Metropolis. But until tonight he hadn't set foot in a nightclub since he turned twenty-one. Ordinarily nightclubs weren't his preferred place to spend an evening, but tonight everything was different.

It had been three years since he'd lost his powers and made love to a woman. Once he regained his superstrength, he'd been afraid to try to have sex again for fear of hurting someone, because human women were so much more fragile than he was. Over the years his fears had grown in his head, becoming magnified to the point of neurosis. Intellectually, he knew he could make love to a woman without hurting her. But emotionally, the thought terrified him.

He was so afraid of injuring a woman that he'd kept the girl he loved at arm's length for years. He'd been in love with Chloe Sullivan for years, but he was so scared of hurting her that he'd pulled away from her on the few occasions she'd tried to kiss him, figuring it was safer to just be friends. The problem was, he didn't really want to be merely friends with her, and the mental conflict between his desires and his fears was slowly driving him crazy.

Last night he'd been sitting alone in his dorm room at Met U, thought about spending another lonely Friday night studying, and something inside him had snapped. All of a sudden he'd yearned for human contact, yearned for Chloe, so badly he couldn't stand it anymore. He'd jumped to his feet and supersped to her apartment, only to stop in shock on the sidewalk, just outside a pool of yellow light cast by a streetlamp.

She'd been kissing someone else on the front steps.

He knew the guy. Ollie something-or-other. Ollie was a decent guy, and he liked him okay, but at that moment he wanted to kill him. He'd stood there in the shadows for a long time, watching them kiss passionately, while rage and jealousy and a ridiculous feeling of betrayal seethed within him.

Which was totally irrational, because Chloe didn't owe him a damn thing. She'd tried to reach out to him several times over the years, and he'd pushed her away, every single time.

Frustrated and angry and inexplicably hurt, he'd walked slowly back to his dorm room... and hardly slept a wink all night.

This evening he'd sighed as he sat down to study again, and his roommate Steve Connor had rolled his eyes."Don't you ever just have fun, Kent?"

"I'm trying to graduate," he answered absently, scanning his sociology textbook.

"Yeah. I remember you were always working your ass off in high school, too. You know, Saturday night isn't the time for studying. Why don't you get lost for a while?"

He lifted an eyebrow at his roommate over the thick textbook. "You have a girl coming over or something?"

Steve grinned wryly. "Yeah, actually. I do."

Envy twisted hard in his gut. God, he wished he had a girl coming over. He wished he had Chloe. But he didn't. He'd lost her. And he was never going to get a girl the way he was going, because he couldn't get past this paralyzing fear of hurting them.

He sighed and closed the book, and as he did, his gaze fell on the heavy gold class ring Steve wore. They'd graduated from Smallville High the same year, and although they hadn't been close friends in high school, they'd gotten to be pretty good buddies since they'd become roommates.

"Steve," he said, slowly. "I'll get out of your way, but only if you do me a really big favor."

"Sure, Clark. What do you need?"

He sucked in a deep breath. "Let me borrow your ring for the night."

And now the ring was on his finger, its red rock glowing, and he wasn't sitting around reading sociology textbooks and feeling sorry for himself any longer. He was looking for a willing woman so he could get laid.

A willing blonde woman.

He raked his gaze across the room, then paused. A head of golden hair was making its way in his direction, through the crowd. His heart started to pound, and an intense physical longing twisted inside him, burning him from the inside out. She was the exact physical type he'd been looking for. She was what he wanted.

As she made her way through the crowd, he could see that she was wearing a revealing crimson dress, its skirt only falling to midthigh. She wore high-heeled red sandals, and although she wasn't very tall, her legs somehow looked endless. His appreciative gaze slid up, noticing how the silky material skimmed over the curves of her body, over the abundant cleavage displayed by the low cut front of the dress.

She'll do, he thought. She'll do very nicely.

His gaze moved up still further, seeing the golden hair spilling over her shoulders, and then she stopped right in front of him. He looked at her face for the first time... and froze. Despite the artificial confidence the ring gave him, he felt confusion fill him.

"Chloe?"

"Clark," she said, glaring at him. "Steve told me you borrowed his ring. What the hell are you doing?"

He stared at her for a long moment, then his feeling of cocky self-confidence reasserted itself, and he grinned. "Getting laid."

"Oh, God," she said, rolling her eyes. "You are not serious."

"Trust me. I'm serious."

"You need to take that thing off right now," she said angrily, pointing at the ring. "What were you thinking, putting it on in the first place? You know what it does to you."

"Yeah," he answered. "It makes me feel like having fun for once in my life. And that's exactly what I intend to do. If you have a problem with that, get lost."

She growled and grabbed for his hand. He didn't fight her, just curled his fingers a bit and watched with amusement as she struggled to pry the ring off. It was impossible, of course, since he was about fifty times stronger than she was, and at last she looked up into his eyes, breathing hard.

Her face was only a few inches away from his, and her eyes went wide as he wrapped an arm around her, pulling her right up against him, so she could feel his erection pressing into her belly.

"Clark," she whispered, trying to pull away, looking anxious, almost panicked. But at the same time he could see something in her hazel eyes beneath the anxiety. Part of her was intrigued.

Not that she'd ever admit it. She reached up, caught his arms, and pushed at him. "Knock it off, Clark."

He bent his head. "Call me Kal," he said softly, and kissed her.

Read Chapter 2 here.